Functional Distribution, Land Ownership and Industrial Takeoff: The Role of Effective Demand

This paper analyses how the distribution of land property rights affects industrial takeoff and aggregate income through the demand side. We study a stylized economy composed of two sectors, agriculture and manufacturing. The former produces a single subsistence good while the latter is constituted of a continuum of markets producing distinct commodities. Following Murphy et al. [20] we model industrialization as the introduction of an increasing returns technology in place of a constant returns one. However, we depart from their framework by assuming income to be distributed according to functional groups membership (landowners, capitalists, workers). We carry out an equilibrium analysis for different levels of land ownership concentration proving that, under the specified conditions, there is a non-monotonic relation between the distribution of land property rights and both industrialization and income. We clarify that non-monotonicity arises because of the way land ownership concentration affects the level and the distribution of profits among capitalists which, in turn, shape their demand. Our results suggest that i) both a too concentrated and a too diffused distribution of land property rights can be detrimental to industrialization, ii) land ownership affects the economic performance of an industrializing country by determining the demand of manufactures of both landowners and capitalists, iii) in terms of optimal land distribution there may be a tradeoff between income and industrialization.

Perturbation theory in a pure exchange non-equilibrium economy

We develop a formalism to study linearized perturbations around the equilibria of a pure exchange economy. With the use of mean field theory techniques, we derive equations for the flow of products in an economy driven by heterogeneous preferences and probabilistic interaction between agents. We are able to show that if the economic agents have static preferences, which are also homogeneous in any of the steady states, the final wealth distribution is independent of the dynamics of the non-equilibrium theory. In particular, it is completely determined in terms of the initial conditions, and it is independent of the probability, and the network of interaction between agents. We show that the main effect of the network is to determine the relaxation time via the usual eigenvalue gap as in random walks on graphs.non-equilibrium economics; perturbation theory

Revised Canonical Quantum Gravity via the Frame Fixing

We present a new reformulation of the canonical quantum geometrodynamics, which allows to overcome the fundamental problem of the frozen formalism and, therefore, to construct an appropriate Hilbert space associate to the solution of the restated dynamics. More precisely, to remove the ambiguity contained in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach, with respect to the possibility of a (3 + 1)-splitting when the space-time is in a quantum regime, we fix the reference frame (i.e. the lapse function and the shift vector) by introducing the so-called kinematical action; as a consequence the new super-Hamiltonian constraint becomes a parabolic one and we arrive to a Schroedinger-like approach for the quantum dynamics. In the semiclassical limit our theory provides General Relativity in the presence of an additional energy-momentum density contribution coming from no longer zero eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian constraints; the interpretation of these new contributions comes out in natural way as soon as it is recognized that the kinematical action can be recasted in such a way it describes a pressureless, but, in general, non geodesic perfect fluid.Comment: 24 pages, 0 figures, to appear on Int. Jour. Mod. Phys.

Exaggerated CpH methylation in the autism-affected brain.

BackgroundThe etiology of autism, a complex, heritable, neurodevelopmental disorder, remains largely unexplained. Given the unexplained risk and recent evidence supporting a role for epigenetic mechanisms in the development of autism, we explored the role of CpG and CpH (H = A, C, or T) methylation within the autism-affected cortical brain tissue.MethodsReduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) was completed, and analysis was carried out in 63 post-mortem cortical brain samples (Brodmann area 19) from 29 autism-affected and 34 control individuals. Analyses to identify single sites that were differentially methylated and to identify any global methylation alterations at either CpG or CpH sites throughout the genome were carried out.ResultsWe report that while no individual site or region of methylation was significantly associated with autism after multi-test correction, methylated CpH dinucleotides were markedly enriched in autism-affected brains (~2-fold enrichment at p < 0.05 cutoff, p = 0.002).ConclusionsThese results further implicate epigenetic alterations in pathobiological mechanisms that underlie autism

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We performed a comprehensive literature search in the PubMed and Scopus data bases on blister-like aneurysms